git-weave(1)

git-weave - weave a sequence of trees and log data into a repository

git-weave accepts an input directory containing a sequence of subdirectories and a metadata file (named "log"), and composes them into a git repository created under the specified output directory (which must not exist).

If the input directory is identifiably a git repository, the weave operation is reversed; tree states from each commit are unraveled into the output directory with a "log" file holding commit metadata (committer/author/comment information and parent headers representing links of the repository DAG) and tags.

Commits are unraveled in commit-time order into directories named for integers from 1 increasing, but their order of composition when re-woven is actually set by the sequence of entries in the metadata file. File trees may be inserted or removed without hindering re-weaving provided the pointers in the log’s parent fields are fixed up properly.

The metadata file format will contain three kinds of stanzas: entries for commits, entries for lightweight tags, and entries for annotated tags. These may optionally be separated by comment lines, beginning with #, which are ignored.

A commit stanza has headers similar to those in a commit raw log: commit, committer, author, and optionally parent headers. The header contents are not hash IDs, but arbitrary text cookies either declared by a previous commit stanza or referencing one. The following example declares "8" to be a commit ID, and references a previous commit identified as 7. Note that commit IDs are not required to be numeric strings, though the unravel operation generates them that way.

The text body of a commit comment or tag comment entry is delimited from the headers by an empty line; the text body must always end with "." on a line by itself; and text lines beginning with "." will have an additional "." prepended to them.

A commit stanza may also have a "directory" header. If present, this sets the name of the subdirectory in which git-weave expects to find the content tree for this commit. For example

A label stanza declares a lightweight tag. This example declares a tag sample pointing at the commit identified as 102.

A branch stanza declares a named branch to be pointing at a specified tip commit. This example declares a named branch devel with the commit identified as 417 as its tip.

A tag stanza declares an annotated tag. This one declares a tag named annotated1 pointing at the commit declared as 99.

When you are composing commit and tag stanzas by hand, you can count on any of the date formats normally acceptable to git to be recognized.

If, when weaving, any committer or author or tagger line, the date is omitted, git-weave will supply as a default the latest modification time of any file in the corresponding tree.

If a committer or author or tagger line is omitted entirely, the user’s name and email address as retrieved by 'git-config' will be supplied as defaults, and the date will default as above.

Thus, the following variation on one of the previous examples is a valid stanza:

This program requies git(1), find(1), and cpio(1) to do its work.

git-log(1) git-checkout(1) git-add(1) git-mktree(1) git-ls-tree(1) git-update-references(1)

Not yet part of the git(1) suite